Visual trend analysis with digital libraries

The early awareness of new technologies and upcoming trends is essential for making strategic decisions in enterprises and research. Trends may signal that technologies or related topics might be of great interest in the future or obsolete for future directions. The identification of such trends premises analytical skills that can be supported through trend mining and visual analytics. Thus the earliest trends or signals commonly appear in science, the investigation of digital libraries in this context is inevitable. However, digital libraries do not provide sufficient information for analyzing trends. It is necessary to integrate data, extract information from the integrated data and provide effective interactive visual analysis tools. We introduce in this paper a model that investigates all stages from data integration to interactive visualization for identifying trends and analyzing the market situation through our visual trend analysis environment. Our approach improves the visual analysis of trends by investigating the entire transformation steps from raw and structured data to visual representations.